Getting to the Bottom of Antarctica's Last Great Mystery

If the Russian expedition to explore the lake buried deep beneath the South Pole didn’t sound enough like a sci-fi horror film, the loss of contact with the scientists last Friday practically begged for a creepy Hollywoodish tag line.

But in a world where ice is desert – and the Internet is hungry for aliens – things aren’t always what they seem.

You're sitting in a shed at the bottom of the world, drilling a hole through the ice beneath your feet. It's unthinkably cold – about -95F – and dry. It's a desolate, punishing place, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And two miles below, back through eons of frozen, undisturbed history, lays Earth's final unexplored mystery.

You and your team have been drilling nonstop for 36 days with a large ice-coring bit. You’ve plugged away at six feet per day, and you’re now about only five to 10 feet out. You’ve just switched out the large bit for a smaller, thermal drill that’s now melting away the remaining sheath.

If boring through an unbroken 400,000 years of the paleoclimatic record isn't enough of a boon to climate studies, the prospect of tapping buried water that by most estimates has been sealed off from man-made toxins and Earthly life forms for some 20 million years is certifiably tantalizing in that, as with stumbling into any hitherto hidden world, the potential for discovery and research is great. Vostok, as this relic lake is known, is over a mile deep and half the size of Wales. Kept liquid by geothermal heat trapped beneath the ice, Vostok is considered so alien that you'll often hear folks speak of it as they would the lake conditions on some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Because really, who knows what sort of Level 12 deep-sea freakery is going down in the gloom?

You're about to find out. And you’re not sleeping, damnit, 'til the first sample of Vostok water is sucked back up the chute.

As captain of this expedition, you suddenly get word of an outside communication. It's an American colleague curious to hear about the expedition’s progress, the morale and status of you and the others. Do you halt the final melting phase and respond? Do you take the call?

Probably not. Well, at least not for a while. You're on the precipice of the unknown, right? But you’re also in a race against inhospitable Antarctic winter conditions, the onset of which has you under considerable pressure to crack into Vostok, draw the necessary samples, and pull out to safety before all goes dark and temperatures plunge further. So yeah, everyone and everything else can suck it and wait.

There's reason to believe this is what's happening right now down at Vostok Station, where researchers with the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Institute are agonizingly close to cracking open the mystery lake.

Until yesterday, it had been a full week since anyone had heard from the team. The silence had the scientific community “waiting on tenterhooks.” But experts were careful not to take the Russian’s falling silent for having veered perilously off course.

“I wouldn't read too much into it,” Robin E. Bell, a Columbia University researcher who has visited the Ice Sheet, tells the Daily Mail. “When you're doing something very challenging, the last thing you want to do is chat to people.” John Priscu, a professor at Montana State University, recently assured usnews.com that the drillers aren’t lost, or even out of touch. The Russians, Priscu now tells the BBC, are rather “very, very close” to taking a giant plunge into the scientific unknown.

As with all the gnarliness that marks the history of Antarctic exploration, noted or forgotten, the risks could not be greater. "We do not know what is waiting for us down there," Valery Lukin, leader of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, admitted last month.

The big concern today is of an explosion. Trapped oxygen and nitrogen could ignite, triggering a cave-in that would potentially endanger the team. (As a precautionary measure, the researchers are allowing only small amounts of air to blast through in spurts.)

Still, taken at a sort of primal level any trek into Antarctica rests on a set of baseline physical and psychological burdens. Even with all the technological advances – not to mention all we’ve come to learn about the place – can we really say that today’s drilling-for-aliens mission is any less risky than, say, the Terra Nova Expedition of 1912? That doomed trek sought to be the first to mark the South Pole. It lost one member to drowning after the rest had perished in starved hypothermia.

These hostile, unpredictable conditions can’t be outpaced. And as he works round-the-clock in a final push toward one of Earth’s last remaining true mysteries, Lukin and his team know full well that from here on out things will only get worse. Tuesday marks the formal close of the Antarctic summer, the mission’s “date of no return.” Which means today is the final day for the Russians to complete the dig, extract Vostok water samples, and get the hell out of that terrible place. Their trek has only begun. We’d do well to wait to hear from them, first.

• Going Deeper Than Ever Before
• Seeing the Strangest Light at the Bottom of the Earth
• Trapped Under Ice: Looking for Dark Matter in Antarctica
• Wings Over Antarctica

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @TheBAnderson

Top image via I, science / Imperial College

Front image via British Antarctic Survey